When it’s time to consider accounting software, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the platform is very important. Obviously, you’ll look at ease of use, support, and how the software meets your unique business case. But it’s also going to be hard to decide between software, especially if your organization is planning on growing.
The trick is to assess the capabilities of the accounting software for what it can do for you now when the company is small. But it’s also important to consider the future and what it will be able to do for you when your company is twice the size. Can it flex with your company if projected growth exceeds expectations?
This article will do a compare and contrast on Dynamics 365 vs. QuickBooks to see which platform is designed for your company now – but also in the future, if your company grows.
QuickBooks Pros and Cons
Are you old enough to remember Quicken? That software was released in 1983, and it was the precursor to today’s QuickBooks accounting programs. QuickBooks cornered the accounting market for the start-ups or small business. It still has wide support in the business community.
But problems arise because when a business begins to grow, they often outgrow QuickBooks. In a comparison of Dynamics 365 vs. QuickBooks, it’s easy to see why QuickBooks is initially a good choice for a start-up business. The problem lies in the fact that QuickBooks is so simple to use, and at first, this may feel like one of the strengths of the platform. But as a business grows, it’s going to feel unwieldy and frustrating to realize that QuickBooks lacks sophistication for larger businesses.
One example is that QuickBooks does not have Enterprise Resource Planning capabilities, which means that the software only offers basic reporting with no real deep dive analytics available. This may be fine at first, but as the complexities of your business increased, this will feel more like a handicap.
Another issue is that QuickBooks is weak on user permissions, offering users full access to all general ledger accounts – or nothing at all. That lack of middle-ground flexibility will become more and more unwieldy as your company grows.
In some ways, QuickBooks lacks the sophistication of other accounting platforms. It is kind of an “all or nothing” approach that can be seen in the general ledger where individual employees and their pay scales are listed with no option to hide these details. While that may seem fine for a Mom and Pop shop, it’s completely inappropriate for larger businesses.
Another fundamental problem with QuickBooks is the lack of precise audit trails. This is one of the biggest complaints we’ve heard from CPAs; there’s no way to track logoffs or sign-on.
But by far the biggest issue is QuickBooks inability to scale. If more than 1,000 transactions occur in a month, the software slows down. It could potentially help to switch to the online QuickBooks, but that’s a different platform, which makes the switch from the legacy application not quite as clean as we’d like.
Here are the kinds of issues you’ll run into if your company is outgrowing QuickBooks:
- You’re hitting the limits of transactions or employees. There’s no option when you hit this wall except for deleting transaction history to make more room.
- At about this time, the speed of QuickBooks processing will start to slow down.
- It lacks an audit trail because posted transactions can be edited with no record of data changes. For CPAs, this could be a programmatic flaw, especially when conducting an audit.
- The software is in no way designed to handle a multi-lingual workforce.
QuickBooks is the number one accounting software on the market for small business. But if your company is planning to expand, you might want to consider another option.
Now, let’s continue our Dynamics 365 vs. QuickBooks challenge with a look at Microsoft’s alternative.
Dynamics Pros and Cons
Let’s get the drawbacks of Dynamics 365 right out in the open. First, if you aren’t willing to embrace the cloud, Dynamics 365 will not be a good fit for your company. Second, the software is so feature-rich you’re probably going to need training to learn its more sophisticated functions, such as marketing or workflow automation. With that said, the user interface will be one that’s already familiar to you – most of us have grown up in the business world using Microsoft Office tools.
Also, Dynamics 365 is going to feel like overkill to a small company, but there is nothing else on the market that forms a cohesive, integrated software universe to handle all of your business functions. The benefit of an integrated universe is that you will not need to have multiple legacy platforms and logins, which will save you time rekeying data across multiple software packages. This will only become more important to you as the business gets larger, too.
Dynamics 365 is so much more than just accounting software. Dynamics 365 has four modules to choose from:
- Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations
- Dynamics 365 for Sales
- Dynamics 365 for Customer Service
- Dynamics 365 for Marketing
There are more than 600 features that even QuickBooks online simply doesn’t have. Here’s a short list of features offered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 that you won’t find in QuickBooks:
- Contact and customer relationship management
- Sales prospecting tracking and management
- Vendor and distributor management
- Project or job management
- Workflow tracking
- Capacity management
- Inventory
- Multiple languages
- Classification of contacts and lists
- Audit control
- Integrated with office and business productivity tools
- Extensive reporting capabilities
In addition to the above, Dynamics 365 has sophisticated security roles and permissions to help keep data safer.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of customers we see are switching from QuickBooks to Dynamics 365 as they grow. There’s nothing wrong with QuickBooks; it just becomes more limiting when companies expand. That’s why, if we’re looking at Dynamics 365 vs. QuickBooks strictly for their ability to scale as your business expands, Dynamics 365 is unquestionably the winner.
